$1.165 million to be sought for Green St. property at Marblehead Town Meeting

Thursday

Apr 25, 2013 at 12:01 AMApr 25, 2013 at 11:04 AM

If three articles on the warrant pertaining to ongoing landfill remediation and closure efforts under way are passed at this year’s Town Meeting, they will keep the construction of the new transfer station on Woodfin Terrace on track for completion in 2015. One of the three articles proposes a Proposition 2 1/2 override, which will require a two-thirds vote to pass at Town Meeting before heading to the ballot in a town-wide special election.

William Dowd / marblehead@wickedlocal.com

If three articles on the warrant pertaining to ongoing landfill remediation and closure efforts under way are passed at this year’s Town Meeting, they will keep the construction of the new transfer station on Woodfin Terrace on track for completion in 2015. One of the three articles proposes a Proposition 2 1/2 override, which will require a two-thirds vote to pass at Town Meeting before heading to the ballot in a town-wide special election.

Marblehead Health Director Andrew Petty, who noted that a considerable amount of his time has been spent on the transfer-station project, noted that designs for the transfer station were about 90 percent complete and headed to the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals to obtain their last local permit.

The three proposed articles stem all the way back to 2002, when waste-assessment activities on the property first identified that contamination from the town’s old ash landfill property had encroached onto Stony Brook Road, an area that has come to be described as the “downstream meadow”; 151 Green St., a private property on a wetland area; and a stream that flows through Steer Swamp, a roughly 45-acre wooded conservation area.

Article 35, requesting that a “landfill investigation and assessment,” appears on the warrant; however, town officials are recommending that article be “indefinitely postponed” due to hesitation concerning the assessment requirements, according to Petty.

The article was meant to investigate the “downstream meadow,” a wetland area that flanks the landfill site to the left, to determine how it should be cleaned up.

“We need more information before any action may need to take place on the ‘downstream meadow,’” said Petty.

Unlike the downstream meadow, Petty said assessments conducted in 2012 funded by appropriations made by Town Meeting the previous year, revealed “ash and burnt material” that had been dumped in the town’s landfill since the 1950s after going through an incinerator had “crept off the property” onto 151 Green St. Article 37 seeks funding to address this contamination, work that, if approved, would be absorbed into the larger closure and construction project.

Engineer Steve Wright of Cambridge-based Kleinfelder SEA Consultants, the firm hired to organize the landfill’s capping process, said in a presentation at the Finance Committee’s April 8 public hearing on the warrant that the $1.165 million override would take care of all the costs associated with the remediation, including a temporary land taking for the purposes of construction, engineering, waste removal and restoration and settlement and negotiation costs. The Finance Committee later endorsed the expenditure.

“We want to restore it to its original state and risk it away,” said Petty, adding that waste found on property consists of heavy metals, including lead and cadmium, two poisonous elements.

During Wright’s April 8 presentation, he explained it would be more costly for the town to “deal with this liability if it’s not included as part of the [larger] closure.” He also noted that placing the potentially harmful material within the eventually capped landfill would be the least expensive way to dispose of the material.

If the town’s landfill were not used, Petty said it would require hauling the material to a landfill in New York, which could require further risk-assessment studies and add an estimated $800,000 in transportation costs to the project.

Article 34 requests that an $114,600 appropriation, which also received the Finance Committee’s recommendation, for regulatory compliance activities. Petty said this article largely deals with continued environmental monitoring of things like water quality, soil gas and risk assessment required by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection agency. The amount is accounted for in the Fiscal 2013 budget (Article 26) and would not require an override.

And lastly there’s Article 36, which would allow the town to take temporarily 11 abutting properties for up to two years while the final touches are made on the landfill’s closure activities, according to Petty.

“We might find little pieces of missed waste when we’re going along the outlined parts of the property, so we would put up a silt fence or hay bales as a form of erosion control,” said Petty.

The cost associated with this article was included in the 2011 Town Meeting’s Article 34, under which an appropriation of $15 million for the landfill's closure and new transfer station was made.

“It a very technical process and project we’re conducting here that involves a lot of town and state agencies,” said Petty.

Speaking briefly on what he’s enjoyed most about overseeing the new transfer station’s construction and landfill closure, he added, “It’s a very large construction project, and it’s a facility that I will be managing in the future, so I’m excited about that.”

The bidding process for construction is expected to begin this summer, according to town documents.